China is waging a drug war against the West, using triads, the criminal underground, and corrupt Canadian officials in Vancouver for money laundering and human trafficking. The “Vancouver Model” connects fentanyl dealing to Hong Kong and Macau, fueling an opioid crisis in around the world. Joining us today is Sam Cooper. He’s an award winning Canadian investigative journalist and author of the new book Willful Blindness: How a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents Infiltrated the West.

Video Transcript:
(00:03) [Music] on this episode of china unscripted the chinese communist party is at the center of an international criminal conspiracy involving money laundering drug trafficking and espionage and it’s all going down in canada [Music] welcome to china unscripted i’m chris chappell i’m shelley jung and i’m matt canister and this episode is sponsored by daily peanut the news can be a tough pill to swallow that’s why daily peanut gives you a daily dose of news and equal parts humor and substance the link is in the description
(00:41) and joining us today is sam cooper he’s an award-winning canadian investigative journalist and author of the new book willful blindness how a network of narcos tycoons and ccp agents infiltrated the west all right sam thanks for joining us today thanks for having me definitely so in your new book uh willful blindness you kind of talk about this um reverse opium war in a way that china is waging against the west so for context broadly speaking what’s happening that quote the reverse opium war actually came from a
(01:16) a very good law enforcement source that really helped me stand up some of the the findings with documentation and the observation was uh for for students of history they know that uh the gentleman traders as i call them from scotland jardine and matheson that were involved in shipping a tea from china to the west and making their money but as i say they made their fortunes bringing the opium in to hong kong and canton and uh really through corruption they enriched people there they got very rich and after you know the local population uh
(01:53) started to suffer uh chinese authorities in those days started to take it seriously and and pushed back on the british and this led to uh the opium wars where the uh you know the summer palace was ransacked i won’t carry on the history lesson too long everyone knows it but this led to what the chinese communist party calls the 100 years of humiliation this is in their propaganda now and you can almost i would say uh some people would say that there there are people in beijing that aren’t really that sad that fentanyl is racking
(02:28) western cities and so this is an observation from law enforcement or intelligence that at a high level china is making huge money from uh from fentanyl it’s made in the factories uh it’s coming west they could stop it if they wanted to but they’re not so what’s the problem here and as i dug into the the book uh got deeper into my research i found that as hard as it is for westerners to believe there is a level of direction at a high level in the chinese state of these transnational narcotics cartels there is uh whether it’s corruption
(03:07) offering protection at a high level to uh drug traffickers that are making money uh and and cycling it back in trade-based money laundering to china or whether there’s a actual intent and that would be you know chinese intelligence operatives happy that western cities are suffering uh deaths from fentanyl and china is making money some of these questions are still open but uh to me uh it is proven beyond doubt that at high levels in china there’s corruption where officials are involved with the fentanyl cartels and
(03:42) in some cases giving direction i’ll finish up by saying you know some of the more aggressive uh intelligence analysts or people from the dea have already made the case that uh hezbollah which is essentially an iranian state-sponsored uh crime does use drugs to weaken western cities and these these same people would would say that uh china is doing the same i haven’t gone there exactly yet but i do i do think that china is complicit uh there’s an omission of enforcement so you could say it’s it’s a type of war and reverse you know it’s funny that
(04:20) you say that um people who are are shocked that maybe the chinese communist party knows about this maybe maybe they’re behind it in some ways because like if you look back at the opium war there was definitely high-level government involvement in that but you know there’s no way china could be doing that today it’s almost as if you don’t learn from history you’re doomed to repeat it i say that from the perspective and i get into this in the book that in some ways i was still a product of my canadian or western education
(04:51) we are taught that governments don’t deal with uh with uh weapons traffickers drug traffickers but you know and i don’t think in the modern era in the west they do uh maybe setting aside some very you know black ops and involving some intelligence agencies there’s not too much interaction but for me it was a mental leap to to to get to the point where what my sources were saying is that at a high level within the within the party in beijing there is this direction of drug cartels and again i found uh in my book i
(05:28) canadian police wiretaps established in a way this fact during you know a a triad war that was rocking macau and spilled over into vancouver yes uh canadian police heard on a wiretap an official in china directing essentially a truce among triads so for me i always say i’m not american my father told me sort of that i’m from missouri you got to show me before i believe it don’t just tell me and i found the evidence for my own eyes but you’re right for students of history to understand that at a high level corruption
(06:04) does occur between state leaders and crime lords yeah it’s not too much of a leap once you dig in and you said something just now that was very interesting there was a triad war in macau that spilled over to canada uh how the you know they’re not not quite next to each other they’re not next but uh what i tell people that i i stumbled or backed into this high level geopolitical espionage story by looking at casino money monitoring and in vancouver at the level of uh of money laundering we’re talking about you know
(06:41) narcos you know movies hockey bags of cash for the canadians that will be watching this audience uh sorry that this show we’ve got a million dollars you know at the at the low end a hundred thousand dollars in 20 bills coming into a casino and so this is this is drug money laundering that was allowed by bc government casinos so why was that happening i discovered that back in 1997 the government raised betting limits in bc casinos which had been very low and they introduced the game of baccarat which is the favorite form of gambling
(07:17) for uh chinese uh economic fugitives high-level party operatives in macau so this is macau money laundering that was happening you know for a long time between china where gambling is illegal macau and hong kong this is how corrupt officials get their money out of china by using lone sharks and gangsters and then this was transplanted onto the west coast of canada so that is how macau style or what is called in canada now the vancouver model of money laundering is actually the macau model and that’s really a big theme of my book
(07:54) could you just walk us through how that system works how the vancouver model works of money laundering yes i i say it’s it’s incredibly complex but incredibly simple in another way in a simple explanation as we know uh citizens of china have an export a capital export limit of fifty thousand dollars per year we also know that uh at the top end in china it’s a lot of corrupt officials and people that have gotten rich through corruption that have the majority of the capital in china so many of them want to get that money out
(08:31) they can’t do it legally with those export controls so they have to go to organized crime this is the macau or vancouver model what you do is you go to your local uh gangster in shenzhen shanghai and you say i need to get money to uh new york city vancouver melbourne i’m gonna put down uh you know the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars u.
(08:56) s it’s put into the underground criminal bank and you say i’m gonna travel to uh las vegas or richmond’s river rock casino or crown resorts in australia and a gangster is going to meet me in a parking lot near the casino and uh pay me out my funds so that in simple terms you put a credit down in china and you travel west whatever city or casino and get paid out you gamble and uh we could go on and on and on but in simple terms for it to work uh so brazenly in vancouver uh they literally would allow people to carry in
(09:36) a hockey bag with 500 000 to a million dollars in twenty dollar you know bricks of ten thousand twenty dollar bills by your casino chips with no problem and then you cash out in a higher denomination or a check and uh you can see quite easily once you have a check you put a down payment on a home it could be just a you know a rundown little shack in vancouver that would still cost you two million but you start laundering and uh you know more drug money to renovate it up into a mansion and that’s how you launder money
(10:08) vancouver style so you’re saying uh the local authorities vancouver authorities know about this absolutely again uh as as hard as it is for for us to believe and for me to believe as a canadian i thought we were an upright law-abiding country the authorities knew clearly the police knew the government ministers knew the regulators knew everyone from the casino cash cage to uh the vip host who treated that traveler from beijing like a king when he came into the vip salon everyone involved that every step in the way in dc
(10:47) knew or should have known not should have known they knew that this money was coming from loan sharks and what what’s a loan shark uh they’re called cash facilitators in the sanitized bc government language these are people that beat their beat their customers if they don’t get paid back in time the customers in order to secure their loans they’ll sign over uh you know the pink slip or the ownership papers to their mercedes to their home uh you know the loan shark will know where their daughter goes to private school
(11:17) these debts are enforced by killers and uh bc’s government knew and did nothing for years well this confirms that my opinion about canada has been right all these years so how does the the the drug trafficking tie into this because what you said in that right now just kind of describes like money laundering but there’s also drugs right so this comes back to these underground banks which uh you know it’s not limited of course to uh mainland china citizens uh we see this ancient form of banking it’s known as hawala
(11:51) in the middle east uh you know it it exists in many cultures but it’s a huge form of underground banking and finance in china because as my my hosts know that there’s a big distrust of the government in there among citizens of china uh and and and the people that control them the authoritarians there’s distrust there so people are very used to hiding their assets or the fear that they’ll be taken away willy-nilly so uh the underground banking you uh the chinese citizens whether they’re a corrupt official a drug trafficker or a computer programmer
(12:29) for them to uh get some security outside china they must use that organized crime bank those banks are built on decades of heroin wealth this is organized crime at a very you know deep and powerful level and uh it’s run essentially through family banks or you know at a high level you could compare them to mafia banks and other cultures it’s very family related so the bank in wuhan is related to the bank in richmond on both sides it’s drug money deep deep deep pockets of criminal money but that what could be legitimate money
(13:06) in china that needs to get out is facilitated by the drug banks so you put the credit down in china you arrive in richmond and you’re getting paid out with cash drug money you have to have professionals that will launder that money you have to have the casinos that will look the other way the real estate industry that will look the under the other way but that money is going on a loop back to china to fund more drug imports that’s where that opium war in reverse comes in so then really the drug money uh i call it it’s almost like it’s fluid
(13:42) it’s a leverage to get money of all types around the world moving and it facilitates the shipment of drugs around the world you know just for some broader context for for audience you know we talk a lot on the show about uh the chinese communist party’s unrestricted warfare that the communist party considers itself a war with the west and drug warfare is a big aspect of this and it’s funny because uh last week we had on the show rosemary gibson who wrote a book called china rx and she was mentioning that you know while
(14:12) all of this chinese fentanyl is winding up in the united states i don’t i don’t know what the fentanyl situation is in canada off the top of my head but uh so while there’s this opioid epidemic being fueled by chinese drugs at the same time china controls a lot of the the global medical supply chain and has been cutting back on the amount of um medicine that you give people having overdoses they’ve been cutting back on that so you kind of see like this multi-faceted drug warfare uh that you can’t really you know like as you
(14:43) were saying earlier it’s hard to it’s hard for us to imagine there that you know our governments would be doing something like this so how could the chinese government be doing something like that but the reality is this is warfare at some level i i i have seen enough to to judge that through omission of enforcement through corruption that is uh officials that regulate and could shut the fact the fentanyl precursor factories down at a moment’s notice if they wanted to but uh are making so much money from the pharmaceutical industry
(15:18) and through corruption we know some of them are making so much money from the illicit fentanyl industry it doesn’t matter uh all of those channels are profitable to china so if they were uh good faith partners with you know western governments if they weren’t involved in something you know whether you call it gray zone conflict asymmetric war unrestricted war people are comfortable with different levels of terminology but what is occurring and what cannot be denied is there’s some there’s sort of a there’s a conflict that is below armed
(15:52) conflict but there are strategic elements to it i’m one that i don’t always judge that uh the people over in beijing have everything all figured out they make mistakes there’s so many actors involved many self-interested that it would hurt it would be hard to see just a you know a computer level uh efficiency to this uh gray zone or asymmetric warfare but it’s occurring and again i come back to the point of what i call sort of my more aggressive sort of intelligence analyst sources do say if hezbollah wants to harm the west using drugs it’s not a
(16:30) huge leap to judge that china some in china may as well and now you also mentioned this which is just it’s like you pulled a thread and so many things came unraveled uh this also ties into the uh what’s happening with the real estate market in vancouver driving up the housing prices and i imagine that’s making a lot of uh residents they’re upset it is and uh you you said that you’re not exactly sure what the fentanyl situation is in canada i can tell you that uh compared to west virginia vancouver is the second uh highest level of harm
(17:07) in north america i i used to report from the epicenter that’s the downtown east side in vancouver again as a canadian i i would never have thought that i could see such a place with such literally war zone type conditions of uh addicts so devastated by heroin and fentanyl and uh yes in the book i found that look chinese transnational cartels have been a very strong base of operations especially in cities like vancouver and toronto they’re making so much money this underground banking that i’m describing that both facilitates
(17:46) a huge flow of money from china some of it legitimate some of it illegitimate but all mixed in with organized crime underground banking that money is just bursting to the surface in vancouver so the illicit money is mixing in with the listed uh the banks the casinos i’m not going to call them listed they’ve proven themselves to be enlisted businesses currency exchanges are entirely corrupted in some some areas of vancouver and this has to have a major effect on vancouver real estate prices uh my example or my data point here is this
(18:23) has led uh through some of my reporting to a commission of inquiry into money laundering abc led by a bc uh high level uh judge and in his interim report he said money laundering is a huge problem in vancouver it’s tearing the fabric of democracy and society we haven’t heard his final report yet but what i judge from that because i reported on these issues is uh hot money when it comes in in large volumes into a city it chases out good money it raises the real estate prices and so the businesses the good businesses the citizens that
(18:59) are working hard to pay taxes save for their children’s university they’re being pushed out of the center of this what we have to call a narco hub city and that people of course people are up in arms and they should be above that you wouldn’t really think of vancouver as a narco hub city you wouldn’t there’s so many there’s so many uh ironies and and mind-blowing uh findings uh for me in the process of reporting this book and it’s true uh i i had to go back and look at how what we call the uh the tycoons of hong kong started to buy
(19:36) large portions of vancouver real estate in the late 80s this coincided with the arrival of triads that are very related to the tycoons and a flow in of a heroin and that the real estate and the drug money can’t be separated in my analysis uh so just again uh a lot of these casinos they’re not just privately run casinos a lot of them are run by the government correct these are bc lottery corporation casinos and uh it’s it’s shocking that a government casino again i tell people in las vegas and macau that jurisdictions much larger much more
(20:17) known for casino activity you could not have that brazen level of drug money laundering going into those casinos they have credit systems they uh there are uh in some ways i’m not going to say macau is not more connected to organized crime because there’s more organized crime in macau but still you can’t have the appearance of a hockey bag of 20s or whatever the relevant currency is in macau going into the casino they’re a little bit more i would say you know smart then the officials in bc and yes these are casinos that my my
(20:52) research showed once the game bacharat and higher bent limits were introduced in 1997 that coincided very well with the arrival of the triads from macau and hong kong and uh the money laundering that was accepted by the local police and bc government just rose exponentially from that point and i i tell people i never stopped being shocked at the the brazenness of the criminality that infiltrated the casinos in bc the number of people that must have their fingers in the pie is is insane it’s insane and uh how can i say that
(21:31) i i have well-placed police intelligence sources well-placed uh civilian intelligence sources uh i have documents myself that say that the transnational organized crime kingpins brag of their special relationships with canadian officials i’m aware of high-level reports which point to widescale widespread corruption in dc and i believe them uh i you know i believe what i see with my eyes and that is vancouver you know to to pull the camera out this is the capital of uh supercars in north america it’s not a capital of finance legitimate
(22:10) finance it’s a city of empty condos mclarens lamborghinis and ferraris and uh casinos run by the government and really run by organized crime i believe at some level well so sam why are your sources coming to you i mean you’re a great guy sam but why aren’t they screaming this from the tallest mountain that’s uh there’s probably two three maybe even ten answers to that but i i would say for the the american friends canada is a society that’s really built on privacy and politeness and that is leveraged by uh nefarious
(22:48) actors there’s a big uh you know there’s again i come back to we have the education and expectation that canada is an upright country but what my reporting and some others have shown is that it has become a home for transnational crime because there’s such privacy because uh law enforcement in some ways is inhibited inhibited from cracking down on some of the most wealthy and powerful uh transnational narcos in the world so why are they not screaming they will lose their jobs i’ll give you a quick example uh in uh in my book and in this
(23:23) commission of inquiry i’ve talked about an rcmp investigator in uh 2012 came out and said uh we the casinos are accepting bags with 500 000 they’re not even reporting it as suspicious they’re just recording it as a large cash transaction he went on to say any average person on the street can tell you something stinks about that and yet it it’s still occurring we believe sophisticated organized crime is using bc casinos what happened he got his hand slapped by the minister responsible for gaming in bc and it appears that his superiors
(24:02) who uh by the way believed his story uh told him or others no you know don’t don’t speak out again so there’s your answer this is like the next narcos or something right like how is this not a netflix tv show narcos canada yeah someday it is it is narcos canada and i i tell you uh you ask why did they come to me uh i’ve been you know when i was sort of a younger reporter in vancouver and trying to understand why people from my generation couldn’t afford a home i started looking for the reasons uh i had to understand
(24:42) that offshore money coming in it was a sensitive topic in vancouver because again perhaps canadians are more politically correct and powerful interests in the city said uh it would be uh xenophobic or the r word i’d say point to another country and say you know a large amount of money is coming from said other country and influencing local real estate prices you can’t say that i i just uh i’m one that i was gonna take the swings and arrows and and say i’m sorry i was taught that the truth is the truth and uh we’re a multicultural country i
(25:18) have friends of uh from all backgrounds and the truth has to be reported so as i put story after story together some of these people in government that may have felt muzzled or may have felt the media was muzzled then started to deliver more confidential documents so you’re preparing for the uh accusations of racism i’m not preparing i’m well well accustomed to the accusations uh my book in the latter chapters uh gets into uh and again i’ll say not to paint myself as a victim but i i the chapter is called strike back hard
(25:55) and i showed that uh safety masks during the pandemic were collected uh at an industrial scale through chinese consulates across canada and surprised some of the people involved in the casino money laundering were very active in those collection and shipping efforts i did a story showing those connections and uh i did face uh an organized campaign uh using the r word towards myself sending petitions out uh ideas were to crowdfund a lawsuit against myself for some sort of hate and uh none of it was uh well let me just say the lawsuit was
(26:34) not successful but those attempts to uh silence critics of first of all the regime in china and uh to try to make it look as if they’re uh coming from a dark place can be very successful in in in inhibiting investigative reporting or the media in canada and uh i’m afraid other countries but canada seems to be uh uh very susceptible to it well hold on i gotta talk touch on something there you talked about it’s known now that the chinese communist party covered up the coronavirus and used those weeks to hoard medical supplies from around the world
(27:12) you’re saying the local government was involved in helping china hoard those medical supplies no i’m saying that my investigation showed that some of the uh some of the people that are involved in united front activity as you know this is china’s foreign sort of interference uh efforts to control diaspora communities some of those people were uh of course involved with the chinese consulates in gathering the pbe and i showed that some of the casino uh actors or to use the right word a high-level loan shark was involved i showed the connections
(27:54) between the chinese communist party the united front and organized crime suspects and how these people were involved in ppe networks and connected in various ways and so i’m not saying the canadian government was involved in any way i’m saying that uh china using the united front uh was involved and uh i would say my story at least according to a canadian security intelligence former veteran was probably uh the first time in canada this network had been exposed to such a level and as my book explains uh there was an effort to
(28:29) strike back hard against that investigative reporting i mean i guess if you have this underground network that’s being used to funnel money and drug money all like why not use that to funnel you know ppe back to china you’re least a patriotic drug lord i mean it doesn’t even sound like it’s that underground no that’s true too well no but i mean that that’s an excellent point this is all about it’s not it i have to hammer this it’s not just about drug money the drug money the organized crime becomes uh you know uh just like a bank
(29:06) it becomes a trade network it is so interrelated with uh factories in china with shipping in china that it’s a channel of uh uh you know sending safety masks you cannot again this is a point i make in the book because of this corruption in some ways you cannot separate large portions of china’s economy from organized crime so of course it makes sense that uh if they’re very active in british columbia you can’t separate real estate and casinos from organized crime because those are the most you know apparently used vectors of this
(29:41) underground or you know almost above ground form of finance you talk in the book also about um the fact that vancouver as a port city is very useful to these um drug cartels or these loan sharks uh the underground banks and then you also talk about uh human trafficking that comes through could you talk a little bit about that sure and uh just a quick data point two weeks ago a fentanyl super lab was busted by the canadian federal police in uh just a suburb of vancouver that’s very related to the areas i’m investigating
(30:20) police said that it could produce 10 million fatal doses of fentanyl per week whoa 10 million that’s enough to kill a third of the canadians and uh this gets to my point that the precursors coming in from factories in china are pressed up in labs whether they’re in mansions single homes or warehouses vancouver has become a crucial hub for that fentanyl production and a trans shipment point and so uh people that are watching this interview in united states japan australia have to look at canada for responsibility the
(30:59) city of toronto suburbs the suburbs in vancouver are very responsible for sending fentanyl around the world the port of vancouver just like ports uh on you know the coast of mexico are important both for trade coming in and for fentanyl precursors coming in and for this underground banking cycling of money going out so if we’re talking about ships we’re talking about legitimate trade items we’re talking about precursors hidden in the bowels of the ships and of course sometimes we’re talking about humans being trafficked as well
(31:32) from the southern coast of china it’s a it’s it’s a big issue the what i call the fentanyl kingpins these would be the people that are bigger than el chapo ever was the people that are making the most money off of heroin and fentanyl they have been most responsible for human trafficking into canada’s west coast and many of these people would be uh you know people trying to get a better life some of them underage women that are trafficked into prostitution this is uh you know it’s all dark but when you’re talking about
(32:04) underage females some of them with gambling deaths being trafficked into canadian cities and then south in the united states it gets even more dark you know i know there’s a there’s um there’s been a movement to label the chinese communist party as a transnational criminal organization and just the more and more i hear just that seemed like a very accurate label there’s a very uh i believe his name is garno a very you know respected journalist in australia that that spent a lot of time in in china i believe he you know he’s made a
(32:42) similar observation if not exactly the same that at a high level uh in the party those connections to organized crime to triads are very strong therefore is it that much of a leap to compare them some would say someone put russia in the same category of you know if there’s that level of collusion it’s a racket the gangsters in the racket the officials in a racket they’re all the same uh is uh you know is the public bureau involved in organized crime i can’t say it that that blankly but we can say that uh you know people from the politburo have
(33:21) been involved with loan sharks and organized crime i mean if you go specifically like back to the origins of the chinese communist party what mao zedong had said and this and he said it he wrote it that that what we the communist party want is for the scum of society to take the lead in creating uh a a china run by the communist party in other words he was recruiting criminals or what he called the scum of society to be part of the upper echelon of the party because he needed those people in order to do things like kill the landlords and
(33:58) suppress the intellectuals and infiltrate the kmt so that his chinese communist party could gain power so like if that’s how the communist party started it’s not that big a leap to think that these elements have continued to play a role for the last 70 years that they’ve been in power i agree and david mulroney canada’s former ambassador to china i i always uh rely on authority when when making uh you know when putting paragraphs in a book and i went to him and and asked you know can it be true that uh the party used organized crime in
(34:35) hong kong you know used the united front to expand and he said there’s no denying the connection from the earliest days as you say of the party until now the the chinese communist party will co-opt and use any tool for their ends and how does it work at a very simple level if you are a high-level gangster and you face uh they want you to go do something in australia vancouver new york or toronto they they will get you on a death penalty you know it is illegal and you can be killed for dealing drugs in china this so they get that on you and then
(35:10) say well if you want to live you want your family to live it’s time for you to go abroad i looked at a case in my book lai chang zing who’s a very familiar figure to uh experts on china former most wanted man he says he was sent to hong kong and uh told to report back on the democracy movement and taiwanese intelligence he then ran to canada and we’d be uh i think naive to believe that you know he wasn’t interrelating with intelligence in in some way once he arrived in vancouver even though he was running from the party at that point
(35:45) wow just the idea that the chinese communist party at a high level and like their court system and everything is sending their most talented criminals abroad to go do criminal activity right it’s even worse than what cuba did when they sent a whole bunch of prisoners they released to florida but in that case they were just releasing criminals to the united states here it’s more like the chinese communist party is releasing criminals and then giving them a specific direction for you know gathering intelligence on
(36:17) dissidents or you know getting involved in this and that like that’s that’s an insane level of pushing criminality abroad it is and again uh for for uh viewers that are thinking that’s a leap too far look we the fbi said uh last year cyber criminals were trying to hack into uh you know world institutions that are trying to you know get a vaccine for for covet 19 and organized crime in china was being used to try to hack it and steal that intellectual property the fbi said china has joined that uh i i think they said you know uh uh very
(36:57) let’s just say a shady group of nations that will use organized crime and so whether it’s releasing your your most uh violence and cutting gangsters into other cities and using some of their drug proceeds whether it’s allowing you know fentanyl precursors to go other countries without cracking down or cyber hacking it is all forms of co-opting and using organized crime i mean last year the us shut down the chinese consulate in houston because they felt it was a center for criminal activity there you go i don’t need to say anymore
(37:33) that you know that the people’s liberation army operatives uh uh very present in u.s and uh canadian cities and uh i show in my book they’re very present in casino networks and so casinos uh real estate art those those sometimes can be a front for raising money for you know more politically uh aimed activities such as bribes or influence donations to political parties in the west you mentioned art can you just explain what you mean by criminals using art i look at a well-known uh it should be better known case uh
(38:12) in my book and explain how it helped me to understand uh this espnr site of the vancouver model there’s a macau casino and developer tycoon who allegedly also you know a high-level triad boss was nailed by the fbi on something like 19 million dollars worth of transfers into new york city area he allegedly had corrupted former uh head of the united nations john ash who is not with us anymore and a related official the case is that 19 million flows into the united states from abroad some of it goes to las vegas casinos
(38:52) some of it is for art and for real estate but some of it is used to bribe officials such as the two u.n officials and so when we’re looking at these high-end luxury goods they’re very sort of they can be gray or black markets they can be good stores of value but as i said they could also be you can look very much like a decadent corrupt official involved in buying real estate or arts in new york city and at the same time uh through the uh you know and through the back side you can be bribing officials and it’s a good cover
(39:27) yeah it’s interesting that you talk in the book about how when these kind of like tycoons start coming over or the the triad people start coming over to canada and they claim refugee status they say you know they’re persecuted by the chinese communist party but then you know there’s photos of them with consulate officials and with you know provincial like bc officials and things like that it’s it’s kind of mind-blowing it is and it’s it’s absolute textbook uh the big circle boys is the gang that was very related to the
(40:00) the red guards and uh became uh you know really probably the most prolific triad outside of china and almost every case we looked at or i looked at when they would land in canada they would say oh i i’m for democracy i had a factory that was printing uh pro-democracy t-shirts in kwanzaa and that’s why i’m on the run but as soon as they arrived uh you know they did hook up with consulate figures one of them who i point to uh joined a pro-democracy society in vancouver run by a high-level uh canadian politician who just
(40:38) for some reason this canadian politician always seemed to turn up in photos with rcmp suspects and so what it points to is there’s democracy is used as a you know a billboard but it’s it’s very clear that they’re not they’re not fans of democracy they’re working with the party in both criminal ways and my book found in espionage ways once established in canada maybe they were just fans of what mao zedong referred to as the people’s democratic dictatorship the i hadn’t heard that slave i hadn’t seen t-shirts of that one either but uh
(41:17) yeah they you know they they’ve got a story and it’s almost comical how often they said uh i ran from china because i’m for democracy and as soon as they arrived they were found to be working with uh with gangsters and uh in some cases consulate officials well i think what your book does so well is showing how everything is connected you know human trafficking drug trafficking espionage and what kills me is you know there’s there’s really a very fine line between uh you know triads pla and the chinese communist party itself
(41:53) and yet you still have like american or even taiwanese companies being like well you know we’ll we’ll we’ll do business with this private chinese company making semi-conductors with them like there’s that that can’t be a national security issue they’re they’re private companies totally private company that that that’s one that always uh that always breaks my uh breaks my head when i try to figure it out uh in canada the example is uh you know two two canadians were kidnapped this is state level you know hostage
(42:28) diplomacy and and yet there are still people that that want to deal like with this as if it’s a normal state and my example that i can now tell people is yes so you’re you want to you want to set up a trade deal at a high level with a country that is using trade to move uh you know money elicit money to human traffic and uh to for some you know through corruption to facilitate drug trafficking around the world and it all winds together with the whole ball of wax trade you know is infected by this dealing with criminality
(43:07) are the you know high-level canadian elected officials who are doing this are they doing it because they’re just ignorant or is there more to it some of them have to be uh corrupted some of them have to be uh undeclared agents of uh of foreign states uh look my book explains the case of what’s believed to be the worst if not one of the worst intelligence uh breaches in canadian history we have the federal the rcmp’s uh former uh head of intelligence for the whole national force who was basically you know helping the
(43:47) highest level money launderers and gangsters in the world evade detection according to the allegations this is canada’s top police intelligence official allegedly enriching himself from a gangsters money launderers uh and uh we or my sources asked the question you know could he have been misdirecting canada’s federal police force from investigating chinese organized crime chinese corruption chinese influence the same with iran so that that points to one case of what looks like a very high level compromise and i looked at a number of politicians
(44:24) in the book that do appear well will say that they don’t appear to be acting in canada’s interest so whose are they acting it breaks my heart because when i think of the royal canadian mounted police i think of due south we do right now yeah that’s what i think of well so what does this mean for the five eyes security alliance if you talk to some of my more cynical sources they would say that canada again i hate to say it is is in a bad position because it has become a bit of a weak link i think uh everyone to this point not everyone
(45:03) people that are watching closely would say that new zealand would be probably the most endangered of infiltration concerns that they were starting to hew a little bit toward beijing and away from the five eyes even certainly uh some in australia feel that way but i think what my book shows is the the danger of compromise in canada if not equal is a concern and you have to ask the question uh the other five eyes have said huawei does not do business in this country no they’re not going to run 5g because intelligence says that huawei
(45:39) is a you know a military intelligence firm we just saw news today that uh huawei was declared a military uh essentially corporation by the u.s government so you can’t do business with it u.s government goes further and further to blocking a military intelligence vector as they see it and yet canada hasn’t hasn’t taken that step at all so you have to ask why is it naivety is it ignorance or are there some people that are could be in a you know a worse position than uh willful blindness or ignorance well if you if canada you know catches these these
(46:17) high-level you know canadian politician criminals they should just send them abroad yeah send them to our senate send them to china well yeah no i wouldn’t wish that on uh you know we laughed but there there’s a person uh who was a tycoon who was in a hotel in hong kong he was uh according to the new york times wall street journal and everyone at a high level i’ve you know taken in the cover of darkness uh his female bodyguards were overpowered by uh chinese intelligence and he’s somewhere in china we don’t know if he’s dead
(46:54) dead or alive he wasn’t only a chinese citizen he’s also a citizen of canada and i believe antigua so uh i wouldn’t i wouldn’t wish that on anyone um i hope we can find out if he’s alive someday his name is uh yeah i remember we did an episode about him and the thing that stuck out to me is that he like he had decided that he only wanted female bodyguards right that guy yeah i think that influenced the thumbnail decision which influenced how many views it gets so i know what the thumbnail for this episode is going to be
(47:30) well shelly hates me well okay i want to ask sam about um you mentioned new zealand in australia briefly in the five eyes you know a lot of the things that you talk about happening in vancouver sound very familiar in other parts of the world like melbourne uh with the real estate money uh when we were in we were in new zealand two years ago and auckland was also crazy in this way where it seemed like there was a lot of money flowing in do you have a sense of whether and we couldn’t get any new zealand politician to speak to us
(48:02) that’s true too like there was just when we were in australia like australian politicians were starting to speak out about chinese communist party influence in australia new zealand it was just like nobody wanted to talk about it um do you get the sense that this vancouver model that you talked about is being implemented in other parts of the world without a doubt uh australia and uh vancouver so melbourne and vancouver the pool of whale gamblers organized crime is uh it crosses it’s not exactly the same but uh my research showed that many of
(48:38) the whale gamblers active in vancouver were of course active in the australian casinos we saw bombshell investigated reporting out of australia i believe nick mckenzie who i cite in the book showing where a relative of xi jinping had flown into australia to gamble junkets connected to organized crime were also connected to sex trafficking also connected to political influence also connect to the united front we’re facilitating that activity in australia and of course it’s just you know in a different city it may look a little
(49:13) a little bit different but the model is the same so especially vancouver and australia uh almost match exactly new zealand uh i don’t think the casinos are quite the same it may take a different form but uh it almost seems the political element of uh of influence is the bigger concern in new zealand well i remember in auckland there were like junk houses going for two three million dollars right and then like at the time it was kind of like oh well this must just be all the influx of chinese money but now i’m like rethinking
(49:51) that as maybe that was actually a lot of it organized crime money that’s coming in into auckland as well but we wouldn’t know because no one from the government would talk to us we’re a little bit more shy than the canadian officials but not too much but you’re right it you know it again 50 000 export limit is on the china side for that money to get over to auckland or melbourne the same underground banking and crime model has to be working yeah there needs to be some way for these rich corrupt chinese officials to
(50:25) get their money out of china though it is interesting i’d always thought about that as like these are officials who um don’t trust the system in china are afraid of getting uh taken down some anti-corruption purge and so they’re trying to get their money out of china but from your book i i get the sense that this is also part of this you know asymmetric warfare unrestricted warfare that there there are reasons why this is happening not just for some official protecting their own interests or assets i think that’s exactly right that that
(50:59) is the right conclusion i i come back to saying you know china the public bureau isn’t a super computer they make mistakes so there is corruption there are so-called naked officials you know running away and uh you know sending money to their family members abroad so corruption is part of it but let’s remember that uh there is some intentionality people are sent abroad once they’re caught doing something bad in china maybe it’s time for you to go set up abroad uh you know don’t forget we have your your mother and father are still alive
(51:33) here so you’re to do what we want you to do so of course you know the lie changing case it it’s a good case in point he ran away once you know news broke of corruption involving the public bureau or very close to the public bureau but he was involved in intelligence he was corrupt he’s both at the same time and i i would i would argue that uh you know that that’s a good model to look at it you could be working for chinese intelligence and be self-interested uh be you know different areas of agency but uh so what do we draw from that it’s
(52:08) all bad for the west it may be bad at some time for beijing it may be good at some times for beijing do you have a sense of how this is affecting like the diaspora chinese diaspora communities in vancouver and canada yes some of my uh many of my best sources come from the hong kong canadian or chinese chinese-canadian communities and they would say that optimistically you know the large majority uh left because they didn’t want anything to do with the party now they’re living abroad enjoying democracy uh pursuing their dreams
(52:46) and there’s a fear that there’s sort of an increasing level of control through the united front where we can have you know people being run by the consulates surveilling or harassing or meeting in sort of counter protest democracy activists and i i point to a case in my book where people uh who were just in a church in vancouver hong kong canadians praying for peace during that you know the real summer of upheaval 2019 in hong kong and uh they were surrounded by uh about 100 people waving large red flags and uh you know very intimidating these
(53:24) hong kong canadians had to be escorted by police to safety and they literally i don’t say allegedly i i have the video evidence there were people with those red flags rushing up and taking their photographs when they left the church so the natural fear is these photos are going to be used uh you know sent back to the consulate so that we can use them and leverage family members in hong kong or in mainland china so i would say that there’s a absolutely there’s a big uh there’s a conflict in the diaspora where you have people that say they’re there
(54:00) for democracy there for the country where they live and there is a you know uh a significant hopefully minority well i mean i i hope it’s not going beyond the minority of people that are very supportive of the party and are being used by the party so this is playing out in diaspora communities in canadian cities like vancouver toronto and i’m sure around the world that’s just awful to like you flee china because you’re from hong kong or you’re you know uyghur or falun gong and then you get surveilled uh in canada or in the united states
(54:35) by these like party connected people so like you’re never really free from that it’s terrible we we’ve heard in in canada’s government we have a canada china relations committee hearing evidence from uh leaders or hong kong canadian chinese canadian dissidents saying exactly that they’re saying we don’t feel uh free from surveillance and harassment in our own country by the way why don’t you block huawei 5g you haven’t done so yet that will be used to spy on us and uh you know the canada’s government is not doing enough
(55:14) this is the case that they make my sources in the community make to me and uh i think it’s fair to say it’s the you know i put that argument forward in the book not enough is being done in canada we know in the united states that they’re going after uh the covert fox hunt operations we know they’re going after the pla operatives in canada we don’t see the evidence of uh prosecutions but we do know canada’s uh security intelligence service is being increasingly public about the risk and i would say uh i’m playing the role of uh an
(55:46) independent uh free journalist and in sort of uh getting information from my sources in intelligence and telling a wider uh spectrum of society about this growing risk in canada do you see any signs that the federal government is starting to take this more seriously it’s a hard question because i really wish i could say yes i can say that uh you know my book has been out for about one and a half weeks and i can say that i i do sense you know a bit of a groundswell of sort of popular uh acceptance of the book as as you know uh
(56:23) an engaging uh you know case and uh you know it it’s you know facts and evidence high-level sources telling a rather incredible story how can this be happening in canada and yet it is part of my uh you know part of my narrative again is you know this was hard for me to believe i had to prove it to myself i had to go beyond thresholds to to be able to write that yes the party and organized crime at a high level are working together and that’s a bad thing it just i don’t think uh let me put it this way i securian
(56:58) intelligence even uh you know there’s a lot of well-meaning and and well-read politicians in canada that have made the case that this is a serious threat to democracy to society but we haven’t taken the steps in canada that uh for example australia or the united states have taken so what’s the hold up and concerning canada that’s my question so what is the solution there’s a simple solution again uh well nothing is simple but there’s a blueprint in front of canada’s parliament the security and intelligence committee
(57:35) has said australia is an exemplar australian canada you know very comparable in some ways you know both with a sort of anglo-british sort of uh initial diaspora heritage and now very you know multicultural and cohesive in some ways and yet under attack in some ways from hostile foreign forces similar size economies fairly similar laws but australia in the past two three years has put very rigorous foreign interference laws in place australian federal police are you know very effective in working with united states law enforcement
(58:11) and we look at canada we can’t say the same so uh the solution is there’s a there’s documents in front of parliament the sitting government saying you can do what australia has done within canada’s legal framework go do it that’s the solution it’s as simple as that for me well sam thank you again for joining us once again the book is willful blindness i’ll put a link below but uh for anyone watching where else can they follow you uh they can follow me on uh twitter at scoopercooper on twitter uh and they can watch for my
(58:46) journalism uh coming out on the internets as they say all right well thanks it’s it never feels right to say it’s been a pleasure on this podcast uh it’s been enlightening thanks again sam thank you know it always amazes me how like all these different pieces kind of end up coming together it is like that conspiracy theory guy you know that means he’s just thinking about the guy with the yeah all the right things and they come in it comes together and ccp at the center of that it really is accurate i mean when you’re
(59:20) reading the book it reads like a thriller you know what i mean it’s just like all this crazy stuff that’s happening canada i tell you what i mean a lot of it goes back to before you know any of us were doing reporting on china it goes back to the 70s 80s 90s yeah yeah it’s crazy about all the things that had to happen for vancouver to become this narco hub essentially they had to have you know suddenly relaxed their immigration standards in the 90s so that you didn’t have to have papers to come to canada literally there’s one
(59:54) scene in the book where this guy just flushes his passport down the toilet of the plane because he’s like he can just get he can just come and declare who he is and say that he wants to declare refugee status wow and then like the thing that sam was talking about with like suddenly they introduced baccarat and like then they had no limits on the the the amount of money for high-stakes gambling just like all these pieces that the ccp then came in and took advantage of jeez yeah i know it’s it’s it’s pretty insane and also that like
(1:00:27) the casinos in canada are run by the government yeah that’s also super well i mean weird that was weird to me too but it’s essentially through kind of how you know us states have those lotteries that are run by states so in canada the lottery corporations for their provincial governments also run casinos i mean i think it’s weird that the lottery in the united states is run by state governments but you know you know it’s a good way to make money off of look if the government wants to steal our money they can just
(1:00:57) raise taxes or create inflation ah yes well tax on the lower and middle class dislike lotteries there we go it’s a perfect system well casinos apparently is i mean even if these guys lose some money at the casinos right it’s worth it if you want you’ve got to get like five million dollars out of china yeah when you have a fifty thousand dollar limit right yeah and then you gotta lose like one percent at a casino yeah i mean you might lose like two or three percent yeah but that’s just like the fee for doing business yeah
(1:01:29) you know i remember us doing this episode about money laundering in macau through the casinos remember this match i do remember that uh because because i did most of the writing for that and it was and i did when i was researching it i was kind of shocked at how like they’ve developed this intricate system of like mainlanders and they had this kind of like um uh hawala system uh also where they they give money to like a chinese uh travel company and then the travel company gives them like free casino chips and then the casino
(1:02:05) chips are used when they get to macau and they play baccarat and then they get the money out in hong kong dollars or u.s dollars or whatever they’re like different casino chips that they can exchange them for like you can there are there are casino chips that you have to play and there’s casino chips that you can redeem like they kind of use that system like they you get the you you buy the casino chips that you have to play but you can spend as much chinese rmb as you want on that now that system is designed for money
(1:02:34) laundering through hong kong and macau but the one that sam was talking about is money laundering through like directly through criminal or i mean they’re also all criminal right but like directly to these organizations where rmb goes in in china canadian dollars come out in canada and then the casinos help you take the bags of dirty cash and pull it out as you know legitimate winnings i mean so much easier having than having to exchange ships and whatever you just go in with hockey bags with 20s that was a very canadian specific
(1:03:10) reference yeah i mean just yeah that is well hockey bags are large is what i’m getting from yeah but yeah i mean it’s just a crazy story that’s happening in vancouver which you think of as i mean have you been to vancouver yeah i’ve been to vancouver i mean it’s it’s basically like san francisco right it’s you know beautiful port city beautiful weather you know mild on the west coast and you’re like oh yeah this is a great place to live and apparently no it’s like the fentanyl capital narco of yeah a hive of scum and
(1:03:48) villainy and uh where among one joe is currently you know waiting outside i’m sure that’s just a coincidence that’s totally not connected in any way all of her halifar houses in vancouver definitely definitely no connection at all i was thinking about that when he was talking about the canadian government being weak on huawei and stuff like you know yeah yeah we need to create that conspiracy charge linking everything up that actually uh that’s i think in that merchandise right there in the book sam talks about
(1:04:21) this police source giving this guy who worked for the the casinos this conspiracy chart essentially that had like all the different like tycoons money laundering kingpins like yeah they call it a conspiracy theory until one day it turns out to be investigative journalism yeah thanks sam for doing that it is a fantastic book i i highly recommend checking it out yeah i can’t wait for the uh you know amazon series they’re not gonna do that no they’d have to film it in vancouver uh why would they not film in vancouver
(1:04:56) oh i mean vancouver is just a place where there’s a lot of people go there to film instead of l.a because it’s a textbook but you know it’s not very flattering to vancouver is it no perhaps not and also you know all the chinese companies that all the people in hollywood want to do business with and okay here’s another conspiracy chart yeah oh yeah we’re going to make that i i promise that’s a good one and today’s podcast is sponsored by daily peanut if you’re tired of us talking for an hour and want some short entertaining news stories subscribe to
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